Chicago (anti-)Democratic politics

I've mentioned a couple times that I've been doing some volunteer work for Chris Persons, a candidate for 48th Ward Alderman. Make that former candidate. To appear on the ballot, candidates must submit a number of documents to the Chicago Board of Elections. Among these are nominating petitions containing a sufficient number of valid signatures (at least 167 for aldermanic races), but there is a laundry list of other nomination papers that must be filed: Statement of Candidacy, Statement of Economic Interest, receipt for Statement of Economic Interest, etc. When Chris Persons filed his papers, he was told by the clerk that all his papers were in order, when in fact one of the documents had been mistaken for another. For this error, he was struck from the ballot without any recourse to get his name reinstated.

Chris Persons was not the only candidate to make a minor error such as this. In fact, both of the other two candidates running against the incumbent Mary Ann Smith were also removed from the ballot under similar circumstances. The other candidates were Christopher Lawrence and Rosita Spane. I don't know much about Ms. Spane. As for Mr. Lawrence, I've heard some good things about him, but I felt that Chris Persons was the most capable alternative to Smith. In any case, now there will be no alternative to Alderman Smith this February 27.

I first heard about all this around three weeks ago, but since I've been so close to the campaign, I decided to hold off on writing about it and allow Chris Persons to communicate this information to the public himself. For two weeks, he contemplated mounting a write-in campaign, but in the end, he realized that without his name on the ballot, he would be at a huge disadvantage. This past Monday, he announced that he was throwing in the towel.

For the time being, Chris Persons' website is still up, and there you can read his letter to the community announcing the end of his campaign. There is also a picture of Chris standing in front of a group of volunteers, including me. The caption reads: "You can take our voice, but you cannot defeat our spirit!"